Hi, it’s me…!

Sorry for the delay in compiling the results of the prediction competitions and getting back to you. Other pressures in my life have conspired to make me very busy, and in the absence of a forthcoming GE, it’s hard for me to make the case for putting too much more time into the blog. I’ve finally updated the spreadsheet to take account of the recent GE results, and so my next post will be a quick projection of last week’s RedC.

The winners of the competitions were Redgreenanarchist (not his/her real name I suspect….) and Ruairi O’hEithir – I’ve e-mailed both of them asking them to nominate their charities. Ruairi’s was particularly close, being 38 individual seats out (remember that’s really 19, as 1 seat too many for one party in a constituency means 1 too many for another), and a mere 10 out in the seats totals. In this, he out-predicted every published pundit’s predictions that I could find (not counting one’s which came to light after the election….)

In terms of the pundits, my spreadsheet didn’t let me down, and my final prediction was 14 seats out. Not as good as Ruairi’s, but much closer to any pre-published pundit I could find. Interestingly, the closest to this was Adrian Kavanagh, who also uses a spreadsheet who was 24 seats out, compared to Newstalk and Sunday Tribune projections which were closer to 60 seats out. I think this should put to rest any debate about the efficiency of using this method to project election results. It’s not perfect, and I never claimed it was, but it’s far closer to reality than the “gut feeling approach” that most people use.

Anyways, I’ll post the projections of last Sunday’s RedC and skedaddle, visitors this evening….